06 March 2014

Why did human evolution diverge from that of our closest primate relatives? What can studying apes tell us about early human social structures? What actually makes us different? In the richly illustrated and referenced Apes and Human Evolution, University of Chicago Professor of Anthropology and Evolutionary Biology Russell Tuttle synthesizes virtually all we know about such questions to produce an authoritative history of the evolution of us. Below, Tuttle outlines some of the major topics addressed in the book, which he’ll be presenting at Chicago’s Seminary Co-Op Bookstore on March 20th.

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In Apes and Human Evolution, I argue that since the 19th-century evolution revolution, theories of human evolution have been biased by folk beliefs about the meaning of individual, sexual and group differences in appearance and customs and by world events, like warfare, and personal experiences of theorists. As apes became subjects of detailed study their behavior served variously to reinforce or refute notions of close similarity between them and us.

Over the past 45 years scientists who trained in programs devoid of anthropology have developed models that emphasize increasingly close affinity between African apes and humans. Some of them claim that chimpanzees are actually people (Homo troglodytes and Homo paniscus) or that people are somewhat more cultured chimpanzees (Pan sapiens). Such claims, abetted by popular books and other media, exemplify poor evolutionary anthropology and are offensive toward the very communities and heads of state to whom we must appeal for scientifically informed preservation of apes and their habitats.

Although the old argument about which nonhuman primates are closer to humans has settled on the apes, many puzzles remain regarding the extent to which we can draw on them as models for specific aspects of our variable genomes, morphology and behavior. Rare major and many minor fossil discoveries underpin phylogenic models of primate evolution over a span of geologic time greater than sixty-five million years, but small samples of fragmentary specimens and very patchy spatiotemporal representation usually limit their informational value. Our Linnaean family, the Hominidae, contained a notable number and variety of species that is difficult to organize into phylogenic lineages, only one of which terminated in modern Homo sapiens.

26 November 2013

There’s a strange sort of dovetail connecting the first-person account of a shaman from the Brazilian Amazon with an attempt by a French maven of science studies to taxonomize “modern” ways of being. The latter—Bruno Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence—is a project of diplomacy inspired by a clear need to reconcile the “plurality of truth conditions” that leads the world away from consensus on issues as critical as climate change. The former—The Falling Sky, by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert—details for Latour’s “moderns” a way of being that grows ever more threatened by that lack of consensus.

Kopenawa, the shaman, has become the face of the Yanomami people of Brazil, but his advocacy benefits indigenous cultures everywhere facing cultural repression, environmental devastation, and deaths resulting from epidemics and violence. In The Falling Sky Kopenawa offers his personal story interwoven with a history of his people and their cosmo-ecological thought, amounting in the end to an immersion so complete as to be deeply unsettling for readers who understand themselves to be the intended recipients of its warnings:

What the white people call the whole world is being tainted because of the factories that make all their merchandise, their machines, and their motors. Though the sky and the earth are vast, their fumes eventually spread in every direction, and all are affected: humans, game, and the forest. It is true. Even the trees are sick from it. Having become ghost, they lose their leaves, they dry up and break all by themselves. The fish also die from it in the rivers’ soiled waters. The white people will make the earth and the sky sick with the smoke from their minerals, oil, bombs, and atomic things. Then the winds and the storms will enter into a ghost state.

[…]

When the white people tear dangerous minerals out of the depths of the earth, our breath becomes too short and we die very quickly. We do not simply get sick like long ago when we were alone in the forest. This time, all our flesh and even our ghosts are soiled by the xawara epidemic smoke that burns us. This is why our dead shaman elders are angry and want to protect us. If the breath of life of all of our people dies out, the forest will become empty and silent. Our ghosts will then go to join all those who live on the sky’s back, already in very large numbers. The sky, which is as sick from the white people’s fumes as we are, will start moaning and begin to break apart. All the orphan spirits of the last shamans will chop it up with their axes. In a rage, they will throw its broken pieces on the earth to avenge their dead fathers. One by one they will cut all its points of support, and it will collapse from end to end. For this time there won’t be a single shaman left to hold it up. It will truly be terrifying! The back of the sky bears a forest as vast as ours, and its enormous weight will brutally crush us all. The entire ground on which we walk will be carried away into the underworld where our ghosts will become aõpatari ancestors in their turn. We will perish before we even notice. No one will have the time to scream or cry. The angry orphan xapiri will also smash the sun, the moon, and the stars. Then the sky will remain dark for all time.

06 November 2013

This year marks the centennial of the passing of Alfred Russel Wallace, who at the time of his death in 1913 was the most famous naturalist in the world. We’re quite pleased to be publishing a beautifully produced facsimile edition of Wallace’s “Species Notebook” of 1855-1859, a never-before-published document that helps to reestablish Wallace as Darwin’s equal among the pioneers of evolution. In the brief excerpt below, James T. Costa gives a hint of why he undertook the project of annotating Wallace’s notebook; and below that, watch a lovely little paper-puppet animation of Wallace’s life and work.

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Wallace’s Species Notebook was well named: it is a window into Wallace’s early evolutionary thinking, encompassing the period in which his fertile mind was churning out paper after insightful paper as he searched for clues to the origin of species. The period of the notebook is, notably, punctuated by the publication of two watershed papers in the history of the field—Wallace’s Sarawak Law paper (1855) and Ternate essay (1858)—among others. In its notes, sketches, and narratives we see Wallace the philosopher and Wallace the collector: the arguments for his planned book on transmutation are found side by side with specimen label designs; his discussions of the nature of species and varieties, the meaning of fossils, struggle in nature, or the branching history of life all share space with notes on the cost of rice, lists of books to read, a proposed remedy for the proliferation of taxonomic synonyms, and a practical scheme for a library of natural history. Then there are the myriad collection notes, from the hunting of orangutans and birds of paradise to his catches of curious beetles and beautiful butterflies.

Wallace is decidedly underappreciated relative to his illustrious colleague Charles Darwin, all but unknown outside of scholarly circles and even little known within, and this despite his being not only the co-discoverer of one of humanity’s greatest insights into the workings of nature—evolution by natural selection—but also the founder of the modern discipline of zoogeography.
He made fundamental contributions in evolutionary biology, biogeography, ornithology, and entomology, and weighed in on a host of social issues of his day in a continuous stream of scientific papers, essays, interviews, and books. One does not have to be a conspiracy theorist to appreciate that history, in some respects, has not been just to Wallace.

That his gifts and contributions are not more widely appreciated today is our loss, for Wallace’s story is nothing short of epic, his achievements all the more poignant for their realization against all odds. Wallace’s unique blend of pluck, perseverance, and creativity were combined with the temperament of a philosopher, the sense of wonder of a child, and more than a dash of genius. This centennial year marking the naturalist’s death in 1913 offers an opportunity for both celebration and reflection on the man and his accomplishments, and there is so much to celebrate and reflect upon. In this regard Wallace’s Species Notebook is an unparalleled lens through which the scope of his early evolutionary thought is seen to advantage, in the context of life in the field where the ideas were conceived. It is in the spirit of enabling the reader to accompany Wallace on his journeys both physical and intellectual that my annotations are offered.

01 October 2013

The historian Daniel Richter’s Before the Revolution is a centuries-deep excavation of the multiple pasts of the land that became the United States. “Excavation” is Richter’s own term, a metaphor that guides the book and offers a fruitful way of imagining the lineage of a land. “The American Revolution,” he explains, “submerged earlier strata of society, culture, and politics, but those ancient worlds remain beneath the surface to mold the nation’s current contours.” He describes these remaining traces, these temporal palimpsests, as “layered pasts,” the new always a product of the old, which itself must be understood in order to fully know the present.

In his own exciting new work of Indian Ocean history, Crossing the Bay of Bengal, Sunil Amrith cites Richter’s figurative geology in presenting centuries of forgotten interconnection that can help us better to understand our modern age, in which the lines drawn between cultures, states, and peoples are tested in ways that reveal their artifice. In laying bare the ever perforated barriers between Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia—today’s names for the lands whose coasts ring the Bay of Bengal—Amrith also highlights the “limitations of the artificial distinctions between economic, political, cultural, and environmental history—and of those between South Asian and Southeast Asian history.” Crossing the Bay of Bengal is, then, a work of history with implications as transformative for historiography as for our understanding of the past.

And also for our understanding of the present:

A history that seemed of little relevance in the heyday of postcolonial nation building now seems urgent again. In two key ways, the region is at the forefront of processes that are shaping Asia’s future. First, the Bay of Bengal is now, as it was in the eighteenth century, an arena for strategic competition between rising powers. Today those powers are Asian rather than European: India and China both eye the Bay of Bengal as a crucial frontier in their competition over energy resources, shipping lanes, and cultural influence. Second, the Bay of Bengal’s littoral stands at the front line of Asia’s experience of climate change: its densely populated coastal zone is home to nearly half a billion people. In this new context, the Bay of Bengal’s history can be a source of insight and explanation. A historical perspective can explain the potential for and the obstacles to greater regional integration. It can show us that many of the region’s current environmental challenges are the (often unintended) outcome of earlier movements of capital and labor. It can show us, too, that informal networks of mobility have always outstripped official attempts to control them—and that these old paths assume new salience today, as climate change threatens to displace millions of people. The Bay of Bengal’s history is, finally, an archive of cultural resources that might help us to reimagine solidarity across distance and to comprehend planetary change on a regional, even human scale.

In the video below, Amrith describes “the furies of nature and the fortunes of migrants” that his book presents.

15 May 2013

It’s just about cicada time here on the East Coast, when millions (billions?) of these strange, noisy creatures will make their way up through the dirt, looking for love. They’ve been waiting down there in wingless nymph form, feeding on the dilute sap of plant roots while they undergo the longest juvenile developmental period of any insect. When the ground reaches 64 degrees and they emerge, outnumbering humans hundreds-to-one and nearly deafening us for our troubles, well, it’s gonna get a bit freaky. Not for nothing did the colonists at Plymouth in 1634 dub them locusts, despite little resemblance to the Biblical grasshoppers.

As entomologist May Berenbaum assures, though, there’s nothing to worry about. “It’s not like these hordes of cicadas suck blood or zombify people,” she says. It’s just such mistaken attribution of outlandish abilities that inspired Berenbaum’s “modern bestiary,” The Earwig’s Tail. She’d come to realize, she writes in the book’s Preface, that “the majority of the most bandied-about insect facts familiar to the general public aren’t facts at all.” In The Earwig’s Tail she takes on twenty-six of “the most firmly entrenched modern mythical insects,” and, in many cases, leaves us with an even more fantastic truth.

When she gets to cicadas, Berenbaum turns to politics and Washington D.C., where the emergence of “Brood X” (the various populations of cicadas run on different schedules and are given roman numeral names) coincides with a presidential election every sixty-eight years, most recently in 2004.

Here’s Berenbaum:

First to take metaphorical advantage of the infestation was the Republican National Committee. On May 14, 2004, at the height of the emergence, 700,000 registered Republicans received an email attachment from the Republican National Committee. A narrator intoned, “Every 17 years, cicadas emerge, morph out of their shell, and change their appearance. The shells they leave behind are the only evidence they were here. Like a cicada,
Senator Kerry would like to shed his Senate career and morph into a fiscal conservative, a centrist Democrat opposed to taxes, strong on defense . . . But, he leaves his record behind . . . when the cicadas emerge, they make a lot of noise. But they always revert to form, before disappearing again.” The voiceover accompanies a time-lapse film of a cicada eclosing and expanding its wings and ends with an animated cicada morphing into John Kerry.

The Kerry campaign’s retort? “Maybe, if given another 17 years, President Bush could create a job in Ohio.” Cicada burn.

Cicadas also had a cameo in presidential politics in 1902, Berenbaum reports, when President Theodore Roosevelt “was practically drowned out while trying to give a Memorial Day speech defending national policy to impose ‘orderly freedom’ in the Philippines.” The experience of inundation seems not to have adversely affected his feelings on colonialism.

25 March 2013

Environmental Humanities, an open-access journal launched in November 2012, aims to “invigorate current interdisciplinary research on the environment” by bringing together scholarship in the humanities and the natural and social sciences.

Last fall, in preparation for the launch, the journal’s Editorial Board was invited to respond to the following “short provocation”:

We now often hear a lot about post-environmentalism and post-humanism as two parts of a broader critique of notions of “the environment,” “the human,” and indeed the humanities themselves. In this context, is there something a bit perverse about embracing the environmental humanities? What value is there in this trans-paradigm scholarship? What are the perils?

HUP author Timothy Morton (The Ecological Thought and Ecology Without Nature) and his Rice University colleague Cary Wolfe produced the following video response. Morton’s is the British voice, Wolfe’s is the other, and Allan Whiskersworth is The Cat.

25 February 2013

Most of the cotton grown in the Mississippi Valley in the 19th century was the hybrid strain Gossypium barbadense, otherwise known as “Petit Gulf.” The strain was patented in 1820 and prized for its “pickability,” as Walter Johnson explains in River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom, new this week. Petit Gulf’s singular dominance in the region produced what Johnson characterizes as a “radical simplification” of both nature and man: “the reduction of landscape to cotton plantation and of human being to ‘hand.’ ”

These two simplifications were intimately linked, but their limits differed. “Cotton mono-cropping,” writes Johnson, “stripped the land of vegetation, leached out its fertility, and rendered one of the richest agricultural regions of the earth dependent on upriver trade for food.” The land, then, could become what was made of it, at least for a time. Human beings, though, could not so readily be reduced, as scholars have long been helping us to see.

And yet, according to Johnson, some of the undeniably important work on slave subjectivity has by now perhaps distanced us from the facts of life in the Cotton Kingdom. From River of Dark Dreams:

The history of the enslaved people who toiled in those fields has generally been approached through durable abstractions: “the master-slave relationship,” “white supremacy,” “resistance,” “accommodation,” “agency.” Each category has been indispensable to understanding slavery; together they have made it possible to see things that otherwise would have been missed. Increasingly, however, these categories have become unmoored from the historical experience they were intended to represent. The question of “agency” has often been framed quite abstractly—counterpoised against “power” as if both terms were arrayed at the ends of some sort of sliding scale, an increase in one meaning a corresponding decrease in the other. But “agency,” like “power,” is historically conditioned: it takes specific forms at specific times and places; it is thick with the material givenness of a moment in time. “Agency” is less a simple opposite of “power” than its unfinished relief—a dynamic three-dimensional reflection. The history of Gossypium barbadense suggests that beneath the abstractions lies a history of bare-life processes and material exchanges so basic that they have escaped the attention of countless historians of slavery. The Cotton Kingdom was built out of sun, water, and soil; animal energy, human labor, and mother wit; grain, flesh, and cotton; pain, hunger, and fatigue; blood, milk, semen, and shit.

While it is easy to lose sight of the elementally human character of labor—even that of forced labor—in light of the salutary political effect of labeling slavery “inhuman,” it is important to recognize that slaves’ humanity was not restricted to a zone of “agency” or “culture” outside their work. When slaves went into the field, they took with them social connections and affective ties. The labor process flowed through them, encompassed them, was interrupted and redefined by them. Slaves worked alongside people they knew, people they had raised, and people they would bury. They talked, they sang, they laughed, they suffered, they remembered their ancestors and their God, the rhythms of their lives working through and over those of their work. We cannot any more separate slaves’ labor from their humanity than we can separate the ability of a human hand to pick cotton from its ability to caress the cheek of a crying child, the aching of a stooped back in the field from the arc of a body bent in supplication, the voice that called time for the hoes from that which told a story that was centuries old.

According to the market-based approach, hazard protection should be allocated the same way other goods and services are allocated in the marketplace. Protection should follow explicit or implicit market signals. The current resurgence in America of the market-based approach might accurately be said to have begun when President Ronald Reagan proclaimed in his first inaugural address: “Government is not the solution to our problem.
Government is the problem.”

Reagan’s approach to market solutions is grounded in an intellectual movement called neoliberalism, a revived form of traditional liberalism that champions free markets and individual liberty in an economy gone global. As geographer David Harvey puts it, “[n]eoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade.” Some may believe that neoliberalism as a guiding principle is waning in the Obama administration. This is not entirely so. While it is true that President Obama and, perhaps, the public have embraced
a more optimistic view of government and its role in American life, current economic forces will ensure that American law and international law continue to follow a market approach to solving big problems. Thus the goal, from a disaster justice perspective, is not to reverse the market approach (as it can’t be done) but to make space within the neoliberal framework for a vocabulary of justice. In this area, the Obama administration may prove a helpful ally.

From the neoliberal model, three relevant corollaries follow. First, neoliberal policy seeks the efficient allocation of resources. “Efficient,” here means optimizing aggregate social welfare in a context of limited political and material resources. “Efficient” does not always mean “fair,” and for this reason free-market ideology is sometimes described as “amoral.” Second, free markets are much better at allocating resources than are governments or other organized institutions. This is what Reagan meant by “Government is the problem.” Third, neoliberalism promotes an ethic—some would say “virtue”—of self-sufficiency and the stoic acceptance of unfortunate consequences. Individuals are expected to assume the risk of participating in the market, and to adapt quickly to changing landscapes. “Instances of inequality and glaring social injustice,” in this view, “are morally acceptable, at least to the degree in which they could be seen as the result of freely made decisions.” Indeed, as neoliberal philosopher Robert Nozick has argued, efforts to redistribute wealth in order to rehabilitate economic losers creates its own injustice by treating affluent individuals as a “means” to enhance the “ends” of those who are less affluent.

22 October 2012

Craig Stanford is Professor of Biological Sciences and Anthropology and Director of the Jane Goodall Research Center at the University of Southern California. In Planet Without Apes, which we’ll publish next month, he details the very real threat of extinction facing the great apes, and urges us to consider the consequences of failing to reverse this course. In the post below, Stanford explains the complex role that ecotourism can play in protecting the great apes.

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Recently, the latest of a decades-long series of incursions by rebel militias into the Virunga Volcanoes of eastern Africa–the last stronghold of the mountain gorilla–led to a bizarre scenario. The rebels invaded a large forest tract in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, driving out the park rangers and conservationists who toil to protect the gorillas and run a thriving ecotourism program. This sort of chaos has happened many times before. But this time the rebels proceeded to set up their own version of ecotourism, and began offering gorilla treks to unsuspecting (or uncaring) foreign tourists. They offered a discounted rate over the actual ecotourism program, charging $350 to hike out to a gorilla group and spend a thrilling hour sitting with the giant apes. The guerillas were now exploiting the gorillas.

Such bizarre ironies are not new to the mountain gorilla conservation effort, which has been beset with challenges over the past forty years that are often stranger than fiction. The gorillas’ range straddles the border of Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The border is poorly marked but well-known to local people and park rangers, who know exactly where one can walk safely without fear of being attacked, blown up by a land mine, or murdered by rebels who live in relative safety on the other side. The gorillas, of course, know no such borders, and they cross and recross at will. Their wanderings through mountain meadows in search of the foliage and bamboo that make up their diet take them out of protected areas and into no-man’s land. This is an enormous challenge for ecotourism, as guides must navigate not only the apes’ world of steep mountain slopes and rainy weather to take their tour group to the animals; they must also navigate the human milieu of rebels and bandits who enter the forest in search of affluent and vulnerable western tourists.

Mountain gorillas were made famous by the late Dian Fossey, who pioneered the study of this largest of the world’s primates. Her zeal in protecting her study site at Karisoke, which sits on the Rwandan side of the border, eventually led her down a path of counter-productive tactics that included threatening the local populace who were threatening her gorillas. After her death in 1985 (at the hands of either an angry poacher or an ex-employee, depending on one’s theory of the murder), her former graduate students approached the government of Rwanda about a new strategy for protecting the gorillas that would rely more on carrots than sticks. A plan was developed to initiate visits to the gorilla groups by tourists, who would pay a hefty fee for such an intimate wildlife encounter. Most of the fee would go to the government, but a small portion of each tourist permit fee would build clinics and schools, improving the quality of life for villagers who otherwise relied on small-scale farming, and who illegally cut firewood and poached wildlife from the forest. The forest and its inhabitants were suddenly worth more alive than dead. Gorilla ecotourism was born.

The mountain gorilla, Earth's largest primate. (photo by Craig Stanford)

Today, tourists can trek to gorilla groups in all three countries that straddle the border. The favored site varies from decade to decade depending on instability in the region, since infrastructure disappears and the place can become downright dangerous during times of political turmoil. During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, only one gorilla was killed even as nearly a million people were brutally murdered. But parts of the forest at Karisoke were left scattered with land mines, and ecotourism understandably fell to a trickle for several years. Meanwhile, Uganda became a major player in the gorilla tourism business, with more and more of the gorilla groups in nearby Bwindi Impenetrable National Park habituated to tourists. Ecotourism was developing rapidly in Bwindi when, in early 1999, a rebel attack on the tourism camp at Buhoma was carried out by Rwandan rebels who launched their incursion from neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo. Western tourists were kidnapped and marched back toward the Congo border. Some were released; others were murdered. Ecotourism in Bwindi ended abruptly, only to resume when the Ugandan military established a major presence in the camp.

Gorilla ecotourism is and will always be fragile. Years of careful planning can be ruined by a single criminal act, or by the outbreak of another civil war. For local people, the disruption of tourism means a halt in essential income. But despite all the setbacks and challenges, it has been the savior for at least this one very endangered cousin of our species.

09 October 2012

For centuries, from Cape Cod to Newfoundland the return of fish, birds, and marine mammals—each in their season—sparked quiet rejoicing in fishing towns and outport villages. Many of those communities had few economic alternatives to harvesting the sea, and fishing folk chose to believe that the sea would provide forever. That belief dovetailed with the attitude of naturalists and scientists, who often insisted, at least until the mid-twentieth century, that the sea was eternal and unchanging, even though almost every generation of harvesters noted evidence to the contrary and raised disturbing questions about the perpetuity of the stocks on which they relied. Beginning in the nineteenth century, however, fishermen’s hard-won knowledge all too often disappeared as new technologies increased catches. Bumper catches obliterated memories of how the same number of men, with the same gear, fishing in the same place, had been catching fewer fish as time passed—an indicator that stocks were diminishing. Shoreside naturalists’ insistence that the sea was eternal and fishermen’s periodic loss of vernacular knowledge that stocks were declining reinforced each other. Combined, they camouflaged one of the northwest Atlantic’s great untold sea stories, a true tale of changes in the sea.

An irony sharp as a sculpin’s spines pervades that story. No profession has ever placed more emphasis on avoiding disaster than seafaring. Mariners instinctively anticipated danger, maintained a sharp lookout, and constantly scanned their surroundings for indication of the slightest problem. To relax vigilance was to court catastrophe. Yet disaster struck for both fish and fishermen, periodically in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, then universally at the end of the twentieth century, in part because neither fishers nor scientists nor policymakers chose to believe that what they were seeing was happening. The sea was not immortal.

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The Harvard University Press Blog brings you books, ideas, and news from Harvard University Press. Founded in 1913, Harvard University Press has published such iconic works as Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s The Woman That Never Evolved.